Communication and collaboration are key aspects in people's lives, both socially and in business. Communication and collaboration tools have been developed with the aim of connecting people to share experiences. In many or most cases, the aim of these tools is to provide, over a network, an experience which mirrors real life interaction between individuals and groups of people. Interaction is typically provided by audio and/or visual elements.
Such tools include instant messaging, voice calls, video calls, group chat, shared desktop etc. Such tools can perform capture, manipulation, transmission and reproduction of audio and visual elements, and use various combinations of such elements in an attempt to provide a communication or collaboration environment which provides an intuitive and immersive user experience.
A user can access such tools at a user terminal which may be provided by a laptop or desktop computer, mobile phone, tablet, games console or system or other dedicated device for example. Such user terminal can be linked in a variety of possible network architectures, such as peer to peer architectures or client-server architectures or a hybrid, such as a centrally managed peer to peer architecture.